It has been a great week, but a very busy one. With the exception of Monday’s very welcome Labor Day holiday, I have been occupied every evening this week.
For example, I had two meetings on Tuesday evening alone. The first was a very productive meeting of our Buildings and
Grounds Committee, which considered the implications of the imminent completion of the new multi-level parking garage, the application of naming rights on buildings, while also looking ahead to the next phase of our building program, the Lower School extension.
This was followed by an excellent, wide-ranging and robust meeting of the Strategic Vision Advisory Team which provided very helpful feedback on the latest draft of our new Strategic Vision document. There is still much work to be done with this document, which represents the considered (and ongoing)
outcomes of our community-wide questionnaire and follow-up consultative days earlier this year. If you are interested to peruse this ‘work-in-progress’ document, you can download a copy at
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/3656033/Strategic%20Plan%20Draft%203web.pdf. (Please note, the file is 4MB, so it may take some time to download on slow connections).
As always, the true highlights of my week focused on my interactions with our students. On Friday, I hosted a pizza party for the children in Years 2, 3, 4 and 5 who had exceeded
their huge quota of book reading during the recent summer holidays. The children were excited to come to the “big kids’ library” where, with the support of our wonderful librarians and their volunteer helpers, the children were served pizza and drinks before I introduced a new geographical game to them.
We had great fun together as I announced that I am starting a weekly geographical quiz game called ‘Where in the world is Dr Codrington?’. This concept is this: as a geographer, I have been to many places around the world. As I have travelled, I have taken thousands of photos. Each week (during term time), I will upload some of these photos to my website and the students can try and identify the place where the photo was taken.
There will be three
photos each week, one for grades 2 and 3 (CE1 and CE2), one for grades 4 and 5 (CM1 and CM2), and one for grades 6 to 8 (6ème to 4ème). The web page will be in both English and French, and the students can submit their answers in either language by Thursday each week through our librarians.
Each week, I will announce the answers for the previous week, and upload an example of one of the top answers received for each of the three age groups. I hope that through this weekly fun quiz, our students can develop a deeper understanding of the geographical and cultural diversity of our world, which seems very appropriate for children in an international school such as ours.
The first week’s
photos are now available
here (in English) and
here (in French). I am grateful to one of our parents, Mr Warren Murdoch, for his creative suggestion to introduce this weekly quiz, and I am very thankful for the enthusiastic support of Awty’s four librarians who will be evaluating the answers submitted – Diana Armentor, Lucas Anderson, Jessica Holland and Emmanuelle Roussel.
I really enjoyed my time with the Primary School children, and we had some great conversations about some of the wonderful books they had read. Some of the children even presented me with some beautiful pictures that they had drawn – as you might imagine, I was VERY impressed!
And yet, what impressed me most of all was the enthusiasm, the zest for life and the confidence of our younger students, as well as their wide general knowledge and willingness to engage. Without exception, I found these students to be articulate without any hint of arrogance, and they expressed their deep appreciation for the special lunch that was provided for them without needing to be asked to do so. Our parents can be very proud of the way their children are growing up to become truly wonderful young men and women.